It was almost five years ago that the Food and Drug Administration published a curious missive to social media, which may have left some people confused. “You are not a horse,” the FDA said in a now-deleted tweet. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
Ordinarily, the FDA wouldn’t have to remind people that they’re not livestock, but it became necessary for an unfortunate reason: An alarming number of people were trying to treat Covid-19 by voluntarily taking a medicine known as ivermectin, which is generally a deworming medication intended for horses and cows.
There are limited instances in which humans should use ivermectin — treating head lice, for example — but according to the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the Journal of the American Medical Association and even the company that makes ivermectin, the drug was not and is not effective in treating Covid.
Americans nevertheless soon confronted a series of reports from across the country with people not only buying the deworming medication from livestock stores, but also inadvertently poisoning themselves. Conservative media outlets didn’t help, and neither did the usual suspects among Republican officials.
Five years later, KFF Health News reported that the National Cancer Institute, a federal research agency, is studying ivermectin — as a potential cancer treatment.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, speaking two weeks ago at an event sponsored by the MAHA Institute, told attendees, “If lots of people believe it and it’s moving public health, we as NIH have an obligation, again, to treat it seriously.”
Except that’s ridiculous. The NIH has a limited amount of resources, and to direct time, funds and energy into chasing a weird theory based on the suspicions of “lots” of laypeople is bizarre.
Making matters spectacularly worse, while the Trump administration takes seriously the idea that a livestock deworming medication might cure cancer, the same administration is taking a very different approach to a potential vaccine for influenza. The New York Times reported:
The vaccine maker Moderna said on Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration had notified the company that the agency would not review its mRNA flu vaccine, the latest sign of federal health policy that has become hostile to vaccine development.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, rejected the company’s application for approval over a concern that Moderna’s clinical trial had compared its experimental vaccine against a product the agency did not consider the best on the market. People in the comparison group received Fluarix Quadrivalent, a flu vaccine sold by GSK.
The Times’ report added that Moderna had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars testing its flu vaccine. Evidently, the Trump administration doesn’t care.
To be sure, this isn’t too surprising. One of the worst public health decisions the Republican administration made in 2025 was terminating federal contracts focused on developing mRNA vaccines — research that Trump himself celebrated as a “modern-day miracle,” before he put a series of unqualified and fringe figures in charge of the nation’s public health infrastructure.
We’re now dealing with the consequences.
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington wrote online on Tuesday night that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is now blocking an updated flu vaccine for no reason grounded in science. American vaccine policy has been hijacked by a conspiracy theorist — yet most Republicans are happy to just sit on their hands. They are allowing FDA policy to be dictated by DELUSION.”
Murray, in a message directed at Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, added, “If I were the Chair of the Senate HELP Committee, I would have moved to subpoena RFK Jr. a LONG time ago, but the next best time is NOW. [Cassidy], what happened to those quarterly oversight hearings? You and I both know it’s well past time for Congress to step in.”
Cassidy has not yet responded. Watch this space.
